The system's incentive: (1) make sure no pass is used to board more than once, (2) indicate whether all ticketed passengers have boarded, and if not which are missing
The gate agent's incentive: (1) board everyone as pleasantly and quickly as possible
So the errant boarder played on the misaligned incentives and time pressure, to bet that the gate agent would ignore any errors.
I'm incredibly distrustful of any system that requires:
- Someone deal with a rare situation
- In realtime
- Under pressure
- While not being incentivized against an adverse outcome
"Well, the person didn't do what they were supposed to in the 1-in-1,000,000 situation" isn't a valid design strategy. (See self-driving-car-interventions and TSA agents)Accidentally carrying a non-paying passenger on an underbooked flight is also adverse I guess but it's not the only way the system can err and it's not the only thing they are trying to avoid.
No one tips a lawnmower for a really tight trim. The lawnmower manufacturer may have worried about that but the lawnmower itself doesn't even worry.
Likewise, the dumb software the agents are using is not making decisions or incentivized.
Now if it were AI, we might worry . . .